No, that is not a prediction that Trump will win. I have no idea. In any case, Trump is no Reagan.
I was cheered last week, when walking back from the bus stop I saw two school buses carrying students from Carleton University to a protest march to the effect that university education should be free. I was cheered because Carleton has 28,000 students and the people organizing the protest could only gather two school bus loads to support their cause.
That reminded me of how it felt back in 1979. The protesting few got all the press then as they do now. You felt alone if you didn't agree with the notion that university education should be free. You might meet others who felt this way and it felt good to talk to them but that good feeling would be quickly overwhelmed by all the press and attention to protesters got.
"Protestor" is an odd word to use here. Then, as now, professors and the university administrators were on the students' side. The government wasn't terribly keen on the idea as the cost of existing social programs was already running high and, as we shall see below, the economy wasn't strong but they weren't opposed in principle; if they'd thought even for a second that taxpayers would accept the cost of providing university education for free, they'd have jumped at the opportunity to provide it. You can't really be a protestor if your really just providing cover for the people you claim to be protesting against.
They protested for a lot other stuff too.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. It turned out that the students getting all the press weren't representative of the majority. Most thought that free university would be a good thing the same way they thought that free beer, free cars and being paid to have fun would be good things too. which is to say, they thought it would be nice but was too impractical to work. Most of us were liberal in that unreflected way you tend to be in your early twenties, but, regardless of ideology, we dismissed the idea as an illusion. We were like Mattie Ross who'd said, "You must pay for everything in this world one way and another."And that included "free" education.
That attitude made us very different from the generation that came before us. Even though we couldn't see it ourselves, our professors could. They called us cynical. They accused us of only wanting to make lots of money. The truth is that we had the bad luck to come of age in the middle of a financial crisis. The recession of 1979-1982 was the worst since the depression up until that time. Interest rates were out of control. Some students' parents were paying 17% on their mortgages.
How bad are things now?
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